A bird strike sent a British Airways jet back to Edinburgh Airport five minutes after takeoff on December 8. It locked the landing gear down and shut the airport for 90 minutes.
Flight BA1443 to London Heathrow departed at 11:14 GMT from runway 24. The strike damaged the hydraulic system during climb. The undercarriage wouldn’t retract and warning lights showed the gear doors stuck open.
Crew stopped climbing at 4,000 feet. They squawked 7700 and turned back.
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Six Circles Over Central Scotland
The Airbus A320, registered G-EUUI, held at 6,000 feet above Stirling while pilots ran emergency checks. FlightAware data shows the jet circled over 35 minutes before the crew decided to land.
It knocked out the green hydraulic system. Aviation Herald confirmed the nose wheel steering stopped working. Spoilers 1 and 5 couldn’t deploy. Engine 1 thrust reverser failed. Alternative braking kicked in.
Passengers sensed trouble immediately. One person posted to Reddit that they heard “very loud prolonged awful noises I’ve never heard before and almost a burning smell.” Several saw hydraulic fluid streaming from the wings. The A320 cannot dump fuel.
The jet circled. And circled.
Stuck on the Runway
BA1443 touched down at 12:16 GMT but couldn’t move. No steering meant it sat on the only operational runway as emergency crews responded.
Scottish Fire and Rescue sent six fire appliances, a heavy rescue vehicle and a height appliance as standard procedure for hydraulic failures. Crews cleared spilled fluid from the tarmac.
A recovery vehicle eventually moved the jet to a stand. The airport reopened at 13:48 GMT after runway inspections finished.
Fifteen Flights Diverted
Inbound flights circled in holding patterns as the runway stayed blocked. Fifteen diverted, most to Glasgow 47 miles west.
But some travelled much further. Qatar Airways from Doha flew to Manchester, nearly 200 miles south. A KLM flight turned around over eastern England and returned to Amsterdam. Ryanair flights from Poland and Spain diverted to Prestwick; easyJet services from Geneva, London and Basel headed to Glasgow, along with Lufthansa from Frankfurt and Pegasus from Istanbul.
One person on the diverted Ryanair flight from Poland wrote on Facebook they circled Edinburgh more than six times before the jet landed at Prestwick almost three hours late. An easyJet flight waited on the taxiway to depart for over 40 minutes.
“I Was Shitting It”
One passenger on BA1443 who posted to Reddit described the landing as rough. “Very hard landing and big swerves while stopping.” They sat near an elderly couple who were going to visit their son and kept them company during the wait.
Another passenger told Business Insider fear set in when they noticed their phone still had signal as the jet circled, which meant they were much lower than normal. “I was definitely sending a lot of ‘I love you’ texts out.”
The wheels touched down and the cabin clapped. One person wrote online: “I was shitting it.” No injuries were reported.
British Airways said the jet returned safely after pilots identified a technical issue and apologised for the disruption.
Second Shutdown in Three Days
An IT failure with air traffic control on December 5 had already forced a two hour closure at Edinburgh, and three days later the bird strike incident shut it down again.
The disabled jet caused hours of delays at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Prestwick and Manchester. Some diverted passengers arrived in Edinburgh late that evening. Edinburgh operates just one runway, so the blockage stopped all movements until the jet cleared.
The damaged A320, registered G-EUUI, has flown for British Airways since November 2002. It remained on the ground in Edinburgh as engineers assessed the damage. This 23 year old jet normally operates short haul routes from Heathrow.
